Webinar Tips #6: Keep Your Audience Focused on the Presentation
One of the most important tasks for delivering a webinar is to keep your audience focused on your presentation. There are many office distractions that can take away from the effectiveness of your webinar if you aren’t keeping the audience’s attention on your message. In order to keep participants focused on your webinar and not their email, the daily news, or colleagues you will need to: identify with the audience, engage your participants, and articulate your message.
Identify with the audience
The first thing you will need to do to keep your participants attention focused on you is identify with them. What this means is develop a presentation aimed at their area of understanding and interest. For example you wouldn’t create a complicated technical presentation designed for engineers to deliver to a sales team; you would keep it in layman’s terms so their mind doesn’t wonder from lack of interest or understanding of your technical jargon. Identify with your potential audience when designing your presentation.
Engage your participants
Another tip for keeping their attention is to make them an active part of the webinar. Interact with them in any way possible: conduct audience polls, call on individuals to speak, ask for text input, etc. Keep them on their feet and they will be forced to pay attention. Another effort to engage is to create a presentation that is not limited to one media. Make sure your presentation isn’t text only. You need to have pictures, videos, etc. Make your presentation diverse and interactive and you will have a better chance of keeping their attention.
Articulate your message
Practice, practice, practice! You want to be articulate in the delivery of your presentation or you will lose control of your audience. You need to be in control and that means you need to speak clearly and effectively. You need to sound as if you know what you are talking about and “um, um, uh” is not a good segue into your talking points. If you sound clear and confident you are more likely to keep everyone listening.
So remember when you are creating your presentation keep your audience in mind before you write it or make changes to fit your participants if necessary. During your delivery engage them steadily throughout the presentation and express your thoughts and ideas clearly and effectively. Do this and you will have a greater impact on your audience.
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